Feature Archives

On December 6, a jury found Linda Lemaster guilty of "unlawful lodging" during Peacecamp 2010 in Santa Cruz, and she was sentenced to community service and probation. Lemaster believes now, even more than when she left the trial, that her being cited for lodging was about breaking up a political protest that relied on a law enforcement strategy that is anti-homeless and has a homeland security agenda.

Saying that Wells Fargo has "case after case of folks who are in foreclosure, forced out of homes they have lived in for decades," protesters portrayed the mega bank as "the Grinch that stole Christmas" on December 18th. Two senior citizen organizations took their money out of Wells Fargo and joined a protest rally outside at Grant and Market in San Francisco.

In a narrow 6-5 vote on November 20, the Board of Supervisors voted to ban public nudity in the City of San Francisco. Community members have protested the legislation, proposed by Supervisor Scott Wiener, for weeks, culminating when individuals stripped nude after the decision was made at the meeting. The ban will be put to a final vote by the Board on Tuesday, December 4th.

On Wednesday, December 5th, the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) will reconvene for what may be the final hearing concerning the request by UC Santa Cruz to extend the water service needed to develop 240 acres of Upper Campus natural habitat, which would require over 250 million additional gallons of water per year from the Santa Cruz water supply.

Occupy the Farm writes: "On Friday November 16, 2012, the University of California (UC) razed all of the publicly planted crops on the Gill Tract. Occupy the Farm is disappointed that the UC has unnecessarily destroyed the hard work of the community and food that could have fed it. The weekly distribution and harvest events could have continued that, over the course of the summer and early fall, have yielded over one ton of food from the crops planted during the occupation last Spring.

For a few hours on November 17th in San Francisco, a Wells Fargo Home loan bank branch was turned into a homeless shelter and soup kitchen to highlight the harm caused by the bank to numerous communities across the U.S. The action was "Brought to you by Occupy Bernal, ACCE-SF, Occupy Direct Action Workgroup, Occupy Action Council of SF, Occupy SF Environmental Justice Workgroup, Community Not Commodity, Occupy Noe, San Francisco Tenants Union, Senior and Disability Action, Manilatown Heritage Foundation, Communities United in Defense of Olmsted."

Program managers delivered a $114 million cost estimate for construction of the proposed desal plant to the members of the Desalination Task Force at their October 17 meeting in Santa Cruz. The $114 million figure is to be considered a range, representing a possible cost of between $97 million and $143 million for the plant, and it does not include the millions spent already during the early phase of planning and promotion of the proposed water project.